Must-have (core, non-negotiable)
- Strong production Rust — ownership, borrowing and lifetimes, traits, error handling, and a type system used well.
- Solid async Rust (Tokio or equivalent): tasks, channels, streams, cancellation, and reasoning clearly about concurrency correctness.
- Experience designing and operating backend services and their APIs (HTTP / GraphQL / gRPC).
- Production experience with relational databases and SQL (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design and migrations — comfortable with raw SQL, not just an ORM.
- A solid grasp of auth fundamentals — OAuth2 / JWT, and RBAC or relationship-based access control.
- At home in a command-line, cloud-native workflow (Docker, CI/CD, some cloud infrastructure exposure), collaborating and reviewing code in a sizable codebase.
Where you could make a big impact
These are areas you can own and go deep on — any one is a way to have outsized impact, and a couple can be a specialty in their own right.
- Real-time and networking systems — WebRTC (SDP/ICE/TURN), QUIC, NAT traversal, or libraries like iroh.
- Media and streaming — GStreamer, professional video codecs (ProRes, RED R3D, Blackmagic RAW), AVFoundation / VideoToolbox, low-latency pipelines.
- Systems-level / OS work — daemons and background services (launchd / Windows services), Unix domain sockets and named pipes, virtual filesystems (NFS / FSKit / WinFsp), caching, and content addressing.
Nice to have / bonus
- gRPC / Protobuf on the Rust stack (Tonic/Prost), with schema-evolution and backwards-compat discipline.
- async-graphql or other production GraphQL server experience.
- sqlx specifically (compile-time-checked queries, offline mode) and Postgres performance tuning.
- Ory (Keto/Oathkeeper) or other Zanzibar-style authorization; Auth0.
- Cloud-native ops — AWS (EKS, ECR, S3), Kubernetes, Terraform/Terragrunt, NATS, Meilisearch.
- Cross-language FFI (swift-bridge, Rust ↔ Swift/TS bindings) — handy, since our clients embed Rust.
- Nix/devenv reproducible environments and just-based task runners.
- Observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana/Tempo).
- A background in film, video, or post-production, or other professional media workflows.
